Technical Field
The present invention relates to an image forming system and an image forming method.
Description of the Related Art
In recent years, it is more important to output not only conventional color images but also high-value added printed materials in an image forming system. For example, there has been known a foil pressing print technique for forming a foil image by transferring foil on a sheet by use of a toner image formed on the sheet as an adhesive in order to increase added value of the printed material (see JP 2013-238733 A, for example).
In order to perform the foil pressing print, the image forming system forms an image to be foil-pressed by a toner as adhesive by use of common units with units for forming a normal color image. The image forming system employs the common units, and thus a user needs to change a print mode when switching between normal print and foil pressing print.
There may be caused, in the image forming system, a situation that foil is erroneously pressed and output onto a normal image or an image to be foil-pressed is output without foil when a user forgets to change a print mode or erroneously performs the change operation. When foil is erroneously pressed onto a normal image to be output, expensive foil is uselessly consumed.
Particularly under an environment in offices, an image forming system is generally connected to a plurality of terminals via a network, and receives a plurality of print jobs from a plurality of users to perform printing. It is assumed that a user changes the print mode from a foil pressing print mode to a normal print mode in such an image forming system. It is further assumed that other user who wants the foil pressing print does not know the fact and transmits a print job including image data to be foil-pressed to the image forming system. In this case, the image forming system outputs a printed material which is not pressed with the other user-intended foil. Thus, the other user needs to set the foil pressing print mode and to transmit the image data to be foil-pressed again in order to acquire a desired printed material. In other words, the other user needs to perform printing again.
Similarly, there may be caused a situation that one user changes the print mode from the normal print mode to the foil pressing print mode and other user who wants the normal print does not know the fact and transmits a print job including normal image data to the image forming system. In this case, the image forming system outputs a printed material pressed with the other user-unintended foil. Thus, the image forming system forces the other user to perform printing again, which causes expensive foil to be uselessly consumed.